Soft Concrete

I finished Hard Water last night in a weird half-awake state which fits very well with the poems. They seem to describe reality but with a fractured sense of the absurd in them - visits by dead people or tidal waves in Liverpool. This is all compounded by being written with the scenery being places near to here. It was coherent as well. Sometimes a poetry collection can seem disjointed as it leaps from subject to subject but this book seems linked though in a way that is hard to pin down.

The Ted Hughes Collected poems is too long to have a complete consistency and I have to say that some of his more famous collections which I should have read before now, do seem a little random in their themes. This is of course the opposite of what we had been led to believe. Maybe I should comment more when I have read more than about 1% of it. I struggled through the first two early poems that I have to admit are a slight cut above McGonagall but only just. Suddenly the poems arrive at a fully formed adult style which may be a product of the editing which has taken only published poems rather than some weird selling-of-his-soul-to-the-devil. Still waiting for The Teatime Islands